This invention relates to a curing device and a manufacturing method for a liquid crystal display using such a curing device.
Liquid crystal display (LCD) is one main kind of Flat Panel Display (FPD).
Based on the orientation of the electrical field for driving liquid crystal, LCDs can be of a vertical-oriented electrical field type and a horizontal-oriented electrical field type LCDs. The vertical-oriented electrical field type LCDs comprise twist nematic (TN) type LCDs, and the horizontal-oriented electrical field type LCDs comprise fringe field switching (FFS) type LCDs and in-plane switching (IPS) type LCDs.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional manufacturing method of a LCD panel. FIG. 2 is a schematic view of a conventional ultraviolet curing process. As shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, liquid crystal materials are dropped on a color filter film, and an adhesive material is coated on an array substrate.
The conventional manufacturing method of the LCD panel comprises the following steps.
Step 101, dropping liquid crystal materials onto a prepared color filter substrate.
Step 102, coating an adhesive material on a prepared array substrate. The adhesive material contains a component that reacts with ultraviolet ray and/or a component that reacts with heat energy. That is, the component that reacts with ultraviolet ray is usually cured mainly upon applying ultraviolet ray, while the component that reacts with heat energy is usually cured mainly upon applying heat.
Step 103, assembling the color filter substrate and the array substrate together in a vacuum anneal chamber to form a panel.
Step 104, executing a preliminary curing of the adhesive material by ultraviolet ray (UV ray) to keep the gap between the color filter substrate and the array substrate. In general, the adhesive material can at the same time comprise two main kinds of components, i.e., the component that reacts with UV ray and the component that reacts with heat energy. Specifically, the preliminary curing includes the following steps: disposing the assembled panel on the workbench 11 within the UV curing device, shielding the display area of the panel with a light shielding plate, irradiating UV ray on the panel to cure the adhesive material 23 between the color filter substrate 21 and the array substrate 22, that is, to cure the component that reacts with the UV ray.
Step 105, curing the remnant adhesive material by heat treatment, that is, curing the component that reacts with heat energy to finish the adhesive material curing process. In the heat treatment, the liquid crystal materials is converted from a crystal state into a liquid state with the rising of the temperature and restores from the liquid state into a crystal state with the descending of the temperature, so that the molecules of the liquid crystal materials can be realigned and kept stable in a crystal state.
Step 106, after finishing the adhesive material curing process, cutting the panel to form LCD panels.
In the above method, after the array substrate and the color filter substrate are assembled together in the vacuum anneal chamber for curing, the adhesive material is cured upon applying the UV ray and then is treated in the heat treatment. In this step, a stock room is needed for storing the assembled panel. Usually, it takes one to two hours to conduct the heat treatment under a constant temperature of about 100° C. The heat supply is usually conducted in a non-contact manner, e.g., by infrared ray (IR) heating or the like.
Compared with the heat treatment, the UV curing process takes only several minutes. Thus a large-sized stock room is needed for storing the panel after being UV cured. The larger the size of the LCD becomes, the larger the space in the stock room needed becomes, increasing cost.